Discovering Courses
I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister of Cheltenham Church of Christ Victoria. This Church had the reputation of being a very large and alive Church. But that was a mirage. The reality was quite different as this young country parson was soon to discover. The life of a suburban Minister has some real surprises.
In 1966 I discovered courses. I think it will be correct to say that up until that time Churches had run special discussion programs on all kinds of subjects and often provided interesting adult education programs, but in the Cheltenham Church of Christ we discovered and implemented a program of providing a course of studies for people who were not Church members, on matters which were not specifically religious, but presented by outstanding Christian lecturers. The big difference in the courses that we ran was that they were professional in scope and were paid for by people who attended.
To my knowledge no other Church in Australia was attempting to do what we were doing. It did not start in a big way but rather in a very humble way with the birth of our first son Peter.
When Beverley and I arrived at the Cheltenham Church of Christ we had a three-year-old daughter and son who was under one. We had been through some difficult days soon after Peter was born in the country hospital at Ararat. They were trying times for a young family far away from grandparents and other support persons in the country and we recognised how difficult it was to bring up young children away from a network of the supporting older family members.
We had looked at a number of issues that we had dealt with concerning our own children – what to do when your child was sick, how to develop a child’s social skills, how to explain death to a young child, how to help a young child get ready for the coming of the next baby and so on. Everything that I had learned in that last year as a country parson came into focus when we moved down to Cheltenham and I started visiting the people and discovered there were many other young couples of our age in the area and many of them were facing the same problems of bringing up children.
I decided to run a course for young parents. I would organise a central location in one of the Church halls, seek out the half dozen outstanding paediatricians and child experts in Melbourne, run a crèche so mothers could pay attention without having to be distracted by little children, and set the whole thing in a warm and friendly environment where parents could ask questions about bringing up their own children without feeling as if they were inadequate or incompetent.
So the first course was born – “Your Child and You”. I gathered together six of the outstanding professional experts in Melbourne in the fields of Child Rearing and put their photos and a brief description of their capabilities into a glossy brochure and on the front page of the brochure had a photograph of my wife and I with our young daughter and baby son. The one line on the front cover just said simply “Even the minister has young children….”.
When you opened the brochure it then showed pictures of young children all round our church and raised the issues that parents worried about, what to do when your child is sick, how to help your child get on with other children, how to discipline your child, how to explain death to a child, how to prepare your child for the birth of the new baby, how to help a child understand God and so on. All of these issues would be covered over a period of six weeks by the six outstanding lecturers and there in the midst of all these experts was my own photograph lecturing on how to talk to your child about God. It did not hurt to associate with the famous!
We popped these in a few thousand letter boxes around Cheltenham and put some advertisements in the local paper together with some news stories on these famous paediatricians who were coming to Cheltenham for six sessions. The response was overwhelming. The cost of the course included a couple of books on Child Rearing including a marvellous book the Baptist Church had just published on introducing your child to God. I had swotted up on the subject and to my surprise as each week went by the numbers of people attending grew so that by the last week when I spoke about your child and God we had a packed hall of interested parents with questions flowing thick and fast. Of course, many of these parents never went to Church and their children certainly did not go to Sunday School but by the time the course had finished they had been used to coming to our Church, had gotten to know me as Minister had used our Church facilities and found them convenient and comfortable and their children were used to playing in our kindergarten or crèche.
Consequently it was the easiest thing in the world for those children to continue on to Sunday School every week and for the parents to become part of a second morning service that I had started designed especially for young parents where the Church service would be bright and brief and special attention would be paid to children. It worked like a charm and the amazing thing was all of these parents paid for the privilege of coming to hear about how to bring up their child in a Christian fashion.
On the last day of the course I sent around a sheet seeking their reactions and the positive comments were overwhelming. However, I noted that more than a few said “You have helped us bring up our young children, it is the older teenagers we are having problems with”. So the second course was born out of the first – “How to bring up teenagers without going off your head”. Again, I followed the same pattern, bringing in six more experts who had dealings with the problems of teenage rebellion, teenage discipline, helping teenagers improve their study concentration, getting teenagers to complete their homework, developing a sense of dress skill in your teenager and even a session on how to understand your teenager’s music. It was at the time when every teenager was listening to the Beatles and a special presentation on the growing fad of rock music and why it was that teenagers liked the Beatles, dragged in parents from all round the community. This time it was an older age group of parents, struggling with teenagers and trying to do their best.
Again, the Church hall was packed and my line-up of experts delivered the goods. Everybody had a warm feeling towards the teenagers and many young kids made comments on how their dad had completely changed and how parents had even asked for copies of their Beatles records so they could listen to the words.
However, this particular course spawned another course, because people filling in the questionnaire at the end indicated that where they needed help as parents was explaining the facts of life to teenagers and they would appreciate if we would have sex education program to help their teenagers.
The Church Deacons and all the members of the congregation were amazed to see all these people who did not belong to the Church queuing up to get into the hall and paying their money to come to a Church program, especially amazed were they when they saw so many of them starting to come on a Sunday morning and become involved in some of our other weekday programs. But the course on sex education was going to provide a headache. The brochure that went out had a simple cover with the word “Slam” right across the front page. It was only when you opened the page you realised that Slam stood for Sex Love and Marriage. This course promised to deal with the biological nature of sexual development, the seriousness of sexual intercourse, the problems of venereal disease and sexually transmitted diseases, the relationship between sex love and marriage and all of this again being done with experts from across the city together with some good films, diagrams and full and frank discussion.
Pine Street alongside the Church was crowded with people wanting to get into our gymnasium which could seat about five hundred people. The series was packed out and the interesting thing is that lots of parents came with their children. We had closed sessions for females only and males only. That sounds rather quaint these days but it certainly had the desired objective because on one side of Pine Street the auditorium was packed with boys and their fathers and on the other side with girls and their mothers as our various lecturers went through describing the onset of puberty and the relationships between young teenagers finding their first sexual urges.
Over the next few years “courses” became a way of life at the Cheltenham Church of Christ. I decided to run a series for people who had been married but were getting bored with it. I used the same principle – advertised in the local papers, produced a brochure and dropped it in letter boxes all over the district. The front page this time simply stated “How to be happy though married” and inside again gave the pictures and the run down of half a dozen experts who would help people work through marriage difficulties. I expected this course to be poorly attended as I felt if people were having troubles within their marriage they would not want to go out and sit in a public hall to be lectured by some distinguished marriage counsellor, letting the world know that they were having their problems.
So I made a good point in the brochure that this course was not only for people with bad marriages who were trying desperately to save them, but for people with good marriages who wanted to make them better. Striking that positive note seemed to do the trick. On the first night the car park was packed out and we had some gentleman with a torch at the entrance way to Pine Street waving vehicles on indicating that all car parking spaces were now occupied. Couples came and sat together in the middle of a cold Melbourne winter week after week and went home and talked about what they had learned and if my guess was right there were probably delighted couples developing their sex life all over Cheltenham, having been encouraged by the specialists who had been talking about coping with differences, finances, the threat of divorce, sexual difficulties and the like.
We did also offer courses for people in specifically Christian subjects. In 1966 the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational Churches were studying the proposed basis of union between the three denominations. It seemed to me that our local Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational Churches were not taking their own union seriously enough, so once more Cheltenham Church of Christ ran a series of studies on the proposed basis of union bringing together the outstanding foundation proponents of the coming Uniting Church into the Cheltenham Church of Christ to lead a study program on what would be involved in Church union.
Here again, our Church halls were packed out except this time they were from the other denominations. I found the series incredibly interesting and it forced me to study the foundations of the Uniting Church and as usual I gave the last lecture as I did in every course with some specifically Christian content. On this occasion I gave a response as a non-participant to the proposed basis of Christian Union. I had not realised that back in 1966 the study and the presentation of the basis of Union of the Uniting Church was preparing me for a move thirteen years later when I was re-ordained as a Uniting Church Minister. Looking back in my journals I see that in 1968 we ran seventeen courses in the year. Each of those courses ran for six or eight weeks and by now the numbers of people attending in a year were well into the thousands.
We never ran any courses in January because people always felt that was the time when Church life slowed down and people went on holidays. I had always followed the principle that having graphed out the church attendance of activities of every month of the year I would take the month that had the lowest attendance and provide something special in it, with the result that Melbourne’s bitter July winter had a special series of gospel services with a Jazz band in the Cheltenham public hall which meant packed out attendances making our Sunday Nights in July, always by tradition the lowest attended in the year, the highest attended in the year. I had started to look at January when the holiday slump meant many Churches closed their evening services and Sunday attendances dropped right down as people headed for the beach.
I decided that this was the time to produce another course, this time for Church leaders and ministers, so the Summer School for Successful Ministry began. This was a big venture as I wanted to bring together outstanding leaders in the field of growing Christian congregations from across Australia. This time we were not planning for the people merely of Melbourne but of Australia. We advertised in all of the Church papers around Australia and indicated that we had secured the services of Australia’s outstanding ministers as guest lecturers. In the first program Reverend Alan Walker from Sydney was attending and a host of others. People like Bishop Jack Dain, Reverend Bill Adams, Mr. Kevin Crawford, Reverend Michael Dennis, Doctor Bruce Peterson, Reverend Doctor Dudley Ford, Jay Bacik, Reverend David Cohen and a dozen more joined our lecturing panel. Bishop Chan do Ray came from Singapore and spoke about contemporary Evangelism in a pluralistic society. Doctor Alan Walker spoke about Evangelism in the local Church, Bishop Jack Dain on committed to ministry, and we had other sessions on using the media, developing an Australian theology, how to improve your communications skills, strategy of Church growth in the eighties, harnessing youth power in Evangelism, reaching children in worship services, conducting a ministry to single adults, releasing the power of tired people and so on.
The idea was to provide throughout January an experience where Ministers and Church leaders from across Australia could live in the homes of our Church members, attend lecture programs each day in small groups around our complex, share meals together and then at night time listen to some great preaching from some of the finest preachers of all denominations in Australia. The first Summer School for Successful Ministry was an outstanding success. Over five hundred people attended the course and we were packed out in each of our mid week preaching sessions.
That developed friendships with Ministers across Australia from various denominations who had never met each other but whose names were well known. The following January and then for the next four Januarys I ran these Summer School for Successful Ministry, with the final one being conducted here in Sydney for some three hundred ministers and fifteen hundred Church leaders attending.
It was the first time in Australia that such a course in in-service training for people in the Ministry was ever conducted. I had recently written a book “How to Grow an Australian Church” which took off like wildfire when the first year some ten thousand copies were sold and indeed to this day several thousand copies a year are still purchased. This was the first handbook on Church Growth in Australia to be published and there obviously was an important market for it. Even though it is now dated and twenty years old it still covers all basic principals and “How to grow an Australian Church” has become a byword in Church growth literature. It was republished in Britain and Canada with the titles “How to Grow an British Church” and it had a new life in those areas. People then wanted me to lecture on the principles in the book and so a whole series of probably three or four hundred lecture programs in every state of Australia was held using the material that I presented in that book. Courses had become a way of life but my life was going on and changing. The courses now needed to be conducted by an expert in that field.
All these courses took a lot of time from running an otherwise busy ministry. In fact it was simply the challenge of other things that turned me away from conducting courses and the appointment of Reverend Jeff Benson, an expert in community education, whom I met in Enid, Oklahoma in 1972 saw the biggest development in the Churches program. Jeff joined us in 1975 to minister in nothing else but developing adult education programs through our Church. By the time Jeff arrived we had been conducting twenty-eight courses with seventy paid lecturers. The year after he had come we were conducting sixty courses per annum and many thousands of people were attending. In the last year of my ministry at Cheltenham, Jeff had really taken off the “Cheltenham School for Continuing Education” as we called it, was using all of the halls throughout the southern bayside area that could be hired to place groups and had had in one year over thirty nine thousand people attending our courses. It was one of the most remarkable developments in adult education that I had ever seen and certainly larger than that provided by any other church of any denomination in the nation.
So my thirteen-year ministry at the Cheltenham Church of Christ came to an end on a very high note. However, courses were still to be part of our ministry although I was not going to be involved in running them. As soon as we came to Wesley Central Mission we had the School for Seniors and other adult education programs with more than a hundred courses running simultaneously and more than a thousand peopled booked into our continual program of courses. We have never repeated the success in Sydney that we had in Melbourne but nevertheless adult education conducted by the Church for people in the community at their expense had become a way of life and a way of seeing the Church as relevant and meaningful. And it was not by accident that the life of the Parish grew and that our evangelism was active because we had this continual source of new people coming under the influence of our ministry.
That night in my study I spent some time writing up my journal and looking out of the window at the never ending stream of cars stopping at the traffic lights at the corner of Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road, that wide intersection that was dominated by the lovely white Church with the high white tower noting down the events of another day as a suburban minister.
GORDON MOYES